From gigantic screens at Las Vegas Sphere and LA’s Cosm to jaw-dropping venues in development across the Middle East (see Future-Forward Entertainment 25/26), live entertainment is supersizing for awe-seeking audiences. Multiple experience designers discussed succeeding at scaling up – from crafting stories worthy of giant screens to mastering ‘invisible tech’, plugging into spatial audio, and seizing white space in sport.

Tech-enhanced/inspired performance and theatre captivated multiple panels, which discussed applications for brands looking to deliver the deeper-feeling-provoking experiences audiences crave. Highlights included experiments in virtual design and machine learning with the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Youth Theatre, and reality-destabilising possibilities from mind-bending immersive theatre company Swamp.

Much discussion centred on how retail and lifestyle brands can make themselves heard in an increasingly busy gaming ecosystem, with strategies indexed for entertainment value, shareability, and transmedia mileage. Coach and Adidas presented cut-through moves including leaning into existing games and making in-game products covetable offline, while Minecraft offered its own transferrable lessons on what works with gaming fans.

As audiences increasingly turn towards individualised and sense-stimulating experiences, creative practitioners in immersive experience design for entertainment, retail, fashion and social media presented emerging tools in multisensory engineering. Potent concepts ranged from sentient spaces that can cue upcoming messaging and shift mindsets, AR-enabled sensory ‘travel’, and prospects in AI-personalised immersion.

While 81% of sports fans globally feel more positively about brands engaged in sports (Nielsen, 2022), consensus at SXSW London was that the art of sports sponsorship requires significantly more than ad buys and kit branding. Panels dived into strategies including fan-shaped storytelling and harnessing the women’s sports boom via companion content.